November 29, 2012 AT 9:16 am

Serve and Return: Pong Turns 40!

They’ve been building to this anniversary for some time. Back in February, they announced the Pong Indie Developer Challenge, a contest where developers could submit their own re-inventions of the classic title. Though not without controversey, the contest did received a number of submissions, eventually announcing the winners in August.

We are angry, frustrated, and in pain because of the violence and murder of Black people by the police because of racism. We are in the fight AGAINST RACISM. George Floyd was murdered, his life stolen. The Adafruit teams have specific actions we’ve done, are doing, and will do together as a company and culture. We are asking the Adafruit community to get involved and share what you are doing. The Adafruit teams will not settle for a hash tag, a Tweet, or an icon change. We will work on real change, and that requires real action and real work together. That is what we will do each day, each month, each year – we will hold ourselves accountable and publish our collective efforts, partnerships, activism, donations, openly and publicly. Our blog and social media platforms will be utilized in actionable ways. Join us and the anti-racist efforts working to end police brutality, reform the criminal justice system, and dismantle the many other forms of systemic racism at work in this country, read more @ adafruit.com/blacklivesmatter

Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.

1 Comment

It was an exciting day when the first Pong came to “The Pizza Hut” (a little mom & pop joint, not the chain of the same name) on Main St, in Farmingdale, NY.

At the time, people were ambivalent about it- sure it was neat, but most of the kids I hung with still liked the mechanical pinball machines better, which took a lot more skill to operate the flippers than Pong’s paddle-pots, at least until you got good enough for the ball speed to increase.

It took a few more years for video games to catch on with most folks. For this old-timer, the venerable vector-graphics “Asteroids” was the high-water mark!

When Pong came out, I was in the 6th grade, and you could buy a slice for 15 cents!